An Article by:

Russell Cole

Bad for Democracy is scheduled for publication in September of 2008

In order to ascertain the significance of the thesis propounded by Dana D. Nelson in her manuscript, Bad for Democracy, it is useful to first characterize the way in which American democracy is perceived according to the collective representations, instructing the political understandings possessed by the preponderance of Americans.

American mythology instructs us that the composition and ratification of the Constitution serve as historical markers for the solidification of American democracy. According to this narrative, prior to the Revolution, there was a growing democratic fervor. Ultimately, this ground swelling of radical democratic sentiment resulted in a rebellion against Monarchy and colonialism. Following the independence of the American Colonies, the devotion to democratic ideals continued; albeit, in a form that was reckless and unsustainable due to its unmanageability. As a consequence, the Founders of the Nation saw fit to innovate a political structure that both manifested democratic principles as well as a state with a workable governability. From there on, as this orthodox history suggests, the Nation was set along a course leading to the continual improvement of its democratic fixtures.

In contradiction to this grand mythology, Nelson provides us with a concise – although thorough – counter-narrative that expresses aspects to American historicity that run in opposition to the premises underlying the standard master-narrative. Central to her thesis is the recognition that the historical trends in American politics have not conformed to a trajectory headed toward an increasingly enhanced democratic embodiment. As Nelson quite correctly indicates, the practice of radical democracy and the cultural attributes with which it is associated – those behavioral habits that dispose the citizenry so that they take an active role in the ongoing affairs of government – had a more complete expression during the Colonial epoch than in subsequent periods of American history.

With the ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of a centralized office wielding executive powers, a trend was set in motion that is comparable to the political transformation undergone by the Roman Republic during the Roman Revolution. That is, similarly to the Roman Emperor, whose ascendancy to power was associated with popular land reform, the Presidency in American governance has been interpreted as a political mechanism offering representation to the populous. Presidentialism, as Nelson terms it – which is defined as the stature that has been infused into the semiology attached to the conception of the High Office – has been, from its inception, increasingly interpreted as a vehicle for the realization of the popular will in the body of public policy.

Even more, the concept of Presidency has acquired a semantic value, adding to the concept a latent notion of paternalism. We, as citizens, are all too willing to submit to this parental authority; not only during times of uncertainly, peril, and calamity, but during times unmarked by social drama, because we see him as the personification of the democracy that we collectively form as Americans. When the President appears powerful and impacting, we relish his strong paternal presence because we conflate it with our collective contributions, as citizens, to American polity.

However, it is precisely this quality that is assigned to the Presidency – an attribution that causes the Presidential incumbent to be perceived not simply as the outcome of democratic process, but as the carrier of the vitality belonging to the body politic – that contributes to the cultivation of behavioral dispositions, rendering the citizenry democratically disinclined. We confuse our ability to engage in a ritualized affair – where we cast a single vote that infinitesimally affects the outcome of a Presidential Election – with the operations of a functioning democracy. This illusion is propagated by the growing authoritarianism of the Presidency – which reinforces the prejudice that voting in Presidential Elections somehow epitomizes democratic civic engagement.

As Nelson adeptly points out, democracy is more than mere electoral politics. For a political order to be democratic, public policy must be determined through the direct deliberative participation of the citizenry. The Republican Romans, for instance, indeed had elected officials. Furthermore, the aristocrats in the Republic formed the Senate. Nevertheless, only through passage in the House of Plebes could legislation be enacted. Although the Republican Romans possessed intermediaries between the state and the public, such as the Senate who could advise and consent, the commoners, whose votes were organized according to tribes, remained politically empowered through their ability to directly legislate.

Democracy, in order for it to exist in America, must take on similar attributes to those instantiated by the Roman Republic. Americans must learn to acknowledge that the unilateralism of the Presidency is antithetical to democratic organization. Democracy is a messy affair; one that involves an ongoing public dialog conducted in an effort to arrive at new compromises among shifting factions. Democracy is not a political condition whereby a “Decider,” as Nelson mocks, is endowed with solitary authority over pertinent matters of state.

The Populist Party of America has already adopted a platform that calls for political decentralization, with the intention to effect a condition conducive to what we have coined, localized democracy. We realized that through the political empowerment of local communities – a state of affairs that can be hypothetically achieved through the decentralization of government – the political influence of individuals can be amplified; thus, accentuating the motivations of ordinary people to participate in the dealings of their municipal polities.

People will become more politically conscious and politically engaged because, within the context of municipal affairs, their participations can have demonstrable consequences upon the public policies that bare the closest immediacy to the Lifeworlds that they inhabit. In other words, the impact that can be had through participation of people in localized democracy will seem more concrete and more relevant and, therefore, more worthy of their sustained interests and their persisting efforts.

In the prescriptions she lays out for a democratic revival, Nelson appears to have unknowingly joined Populist America’s activist chorus. She recommends political decentralization. Even more, Nelson introduces the verbiage, leaderless democracy, in order to designate an organizational state that is comparable to the networked politics that I had summarized in earlier writings that examined a developing theory of democracy, which has been labeled by members of open source software communities as Extreme Democracy:

http://www.midwest-populistamerica.com/articles/theories-of-extreme-democracy/; http://www.extremedemocracy.com/.

Despite the lack of originality marking the recommendations included under the breadth of the normative section belonging to Nelson’s work, she does provide a valuable survey of the various trends in Computer Mediated Communications that are not only leading to a new paradigm of democratic organization, but to a larger intellectual phenomenon that should be considered a new episteme.

The emergence of social knowledge – facilitated through the device of web based communications – is generally characterized as decentralized modalities of content authoring and editing. Wiki platforms, such as the Wikipedia, are demonstrative of this understanding of knowledge and the processes through which knowledge is most effectively constructed. In the spaces generated by the Wikipedia, anybody can contribute to the creation of content by either authoring original materials or editing the materials already published on the platform.

Although there lacks a sufficient amount of studies to draw generalizations with certainty, preliminary studies, such as the one conducted by Nature, have compared the Wikipedia with traditional reference publications, such as Britannica, and have found the rates of errata between the two respective reference materials closer than one would probably suspect. Additionally, the Wikipedia, in comparison to Britannica, possesses a far greater amount of materials devoted to a broader range of topics. Further, due to its decentralized editing process, it takes less time for the Wikipedia to correct its errata than it does for publications, such as Britannica, that follow a traditional workflow process.

All of these developing social formations fall under the extension of the concept, Web 2.0: web platforms that are devoted to collaborative knowledge building conducted by a community of interlocutors. This new form of sociability suggests that radical democracy – a state that is, oftentimes, embodied by Web 2.0 communities – is not only a deontological ideal – a social condition that we should strive to foster, because it is inherently desirable – but a form of social organization that is pragmatically endowed.

In order to understand why social knowledge produces knowledge constructs on a scale that supersedes in volume and quality the knowledge built from traditional social institutions, such as the Academe, it is illuminative to first explore the precepts that support the epistemic prejudices associated with High Modernity and the Academe:

Political centralization, according to its interpretation under the lens of the new social knowledge understanding of knowledge, is a relic belonging to the social condition marked by industrial capitalism: a myriad of interdependent industrial productions that require homogeneity in order for there to be the predictability that is necessary for the various manufacturing outputs to be interoperable with one another. What is more, industrial capitalism calls for cultural uniformity, in order to effect a state wherein the activities of labor can be integrated into the system of interdependent industrial functions that collectively comprise the modes of production; a social organization that requires social agents, serving a labor, to react in predictable ways when operating as cogs in the machineries constituting the modes of production. Following this logic, organizations must possess an executive authority, under which all other offices and capacities are integrated, in order to ensure their synchrony. In short, they must all fall under a unified command structure.

The paradigm of centralized organization continues to reign dominant in contemporaneity. Nonetheless, this centralized model of social organization is not necessarily the most efficient or effective. Whether we are to compare a starfish to a spider; Native American Apaches to the Aztec or the Incas - decentralized structures are proving to be more resilient and adaptable.

Nelson refers to the popular work, The Starfish and the Spider, authored by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, who point out that leaderless organizations – similarly to the starfish and the Apaches – cannot be destroyed by annihilating a single component of their structures. Contrarily, in a case of spiders and in the case of the Native American empires, the organisms can be killed by simply targeting their central nervous systems – or, specifically in these cases, the head of the spider and the metropolises, belonging respectively to the Aztec and to the Inca.

The challenge for the reader is to understand how these properties, attributable to leaderless organizations, relate to potential democratic reforms enacted upon the American sociopolitical establishment. I would suggest that leaderless organizations – or, in the context of this essay’s ensuing sociopolitical considerations, what I shall call networked politics – possess a dual function:

Initially, networked politics can be used as an instrument of insurrection. The recent success of the popular uprising among the Filipino is evidentiary of the efficacy of networked forms of resistance. The insurgents relied upon a moblog – a server upon which contents derived from wireless gadgets can be published by a decentralized public – in order to coordinate their activities. Therefore, the Filipino revolution was not centralized, falling under a single command structure; rather, it was decentralized and voluntarily associational. Although networked politics have just now emerged as a topic of social scientific research, historical incidents, such as the historically recent Filipino revolution, suggest that they might be the optimal form of political resistance in a world where social actors are increasingly connected via the availability of Internet based forms of communication.

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, networked politics are more resistant to the consolidation of sociopolitical power under any particular hegemony. If we look to traditional forms of popular insurrection – those that were guided and controlled, to a large measure, by van guards – we see a tendency for the elites, who orchestrated the successful revolution, to simply consolidate power themselves, forming another hegemonic faction in control of the society’s sociopolitical power.

As Orwell so brilliantly depicted in his Animal Farm, the revolutionary elites – which, in the case of Orwell’s short story, were comprised of the van guard pigs on the Farm – following the revolution, simply transform into the role that was assumed by the previous governing class. Consequently, the pigs, after staging the revolution, eventually morphed into an embodiment indistinguishable from the human farmer who had been expelled during the uprising.

However, in the case of network politics, there is no centralization, so there will not necessarily be any faction in a position to install an elitist governing structure, or hegemony, in the post-revolutionary social order. To translate the argument I am making into Nelson’s terms – the expressions she used when constructing an alternative American historicity – the emergent social condition will not possess a unified executive branch, and, therefore, it will be absent of Presidentialism: The cultural condition whereby Americans are disposed to conflate democratic processes with the presence of a strong, paternalistic Executive Authority.

Russell Cole

Tags: activism, constitution, decentralization, democracy, executive powers, government, populist party america, Russell Coles Blog, self governance, Social Change, sociology, sociology web 2.0
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, constitution, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization, self-governance, Social Change, Sociology, activism, executive powers
No Comments »

Following the Larry Craig arrest for lurid conduct in a public restroom, I had posted a sympathetic letter, expressing pity for someone so tortured, self deluded, and sensually deprived.  I contended that this uncover operation executed by a police officer reflected more poorly upon those who conceive and implement such a law enforcement plan than those who fall victim to its ensnarement.

Certainly, the authoritarian mentality responsible for these contraventions into such consensual activities is more alarming – due to its reflection of authoritarian tendencies by those who wield power – than the prospect of people having sex in a restroom. Disregard for civil liberties can be a slippery slope.

The more commonplace these authoritarian incursions into our private affairs become, the more precedents are established for these government-sponsored regulatory interdictions.  The accumulation of previous instances will inevitably change the backdrop against which we interpret the boundaries between government and the private conduct of citizens.  Future affronts to our liberties will appear passé and a matter of course.  Consequently, they will fail to register in our civil libertarian sensibilities; therefore, the governmental intrusions will not incite our condemnation, and we will neglect to call for their repeal.

Additionally, on a more practical level, sting operations in which undercover officers are stationed in bathroom stalls, posing as willing bath house participants, seems excessive for even the pettiest of people to insist upon, and such expenditures of resources can certainly be better directed in support of law enforcement designed to curtail crimes that are perpetrated against victims, who are injured in the process.To allocate resources, while we are supposedly conducting a ‘war on terror,’ toward the enforcement of these ridiculous crimes against morality is a disciplinarian excess that we simply cannot afford.

From the summation above, I hope it is fairly evident that I made a point not to direct criticism or judgment upon Larry Craig.  I sought to demonstrate that the pressing concerns related to this matter centered around the disciplinarian mentalities possessed by those who feel justified in legislating both morality and aesthetics.

However – and tragically – the Senator failed to learn from his experiences as the victim of authoritarian pettiness. I am not referring to any lesson to be learned regarding the precariousness of having sex in public restrooms.  Rather, I am referencing the need for social tolerance and understanding, which one would have hoped Larry Craig to have realized through his embarrassing experiences.  Nonetheless, Craig has decided to sponsor the latest ‘defense of marriage,’ bill that has been presented by the demagogic Religious Right panderers in the Senate. It appears that Craig continues to delude himself into believing that he is ‘heterosexual,’ and that other people are even willing to entertain the prospect that he has not engaged in ‘extra-heterosexual,’ relationships with anonymous partners.

For my part, I have realized that hypocrites of the most profound order probably do not  deserve sympathy and tolerance.

Russell Cole

Tags: liberty, Russell Coles Blog, self governance, Social Change, social policies, social responsibility
Categories: Commentary, liberty, Russell Cole's Blog, self-governance, Social Change, social responsibility
No Comments »

Insightful remarks on the nature of American politics and governance

“We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.”

–Ramsey Clark

“Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy.”

–John Pierpont Morgan

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

–Thomas Jefferson

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour [endeavor] to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

–Abraham Lincoln

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.”

–Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.”

–Benito Mussolini

The compilation of quotations was derived from an email correspondence authored by Dennis Morrisseau: A Vermont politician, he was the first Republican to run for Congress on a platform that included the impeachment of both Bush and Chaney. His biography also includes an incident during the Vietnam War where he, when serving as an officer in the Military, as a protest to the war, refused to engage in combat, and was subsequently court marshaled.

I have included this brief biographic description because it evidences the differences existing among the various types of political conservatism and demonstrates that the two-dimensional framework used by the punditry to index political ideologies is woefully inadequate and, indeed, in some cases misrepresentative. There are undoubtedly a whole field of ideological commonalities to be discovered between and among all of us, irrespective of the Left/Right division we have been lulled into assuming to impose barriers between us.

Russell Cole

Tags: democracy, plutocracy, political ideology, politics, Russell Coles Blog
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, Russell Cole's Blog, Politics
No Comments »

Monique Davis needs to resign from her seat in the Illinois State Senate.

Due to social journalism, the State Senator has been exposed as a rather outspoken bigot, who scorns religious minorities without pause or hesitation. When listening to testimony given to a committee upon which Davis sat, she erupted in an outburst directed upon Rob Sherman – an atheist who was testifying on matters relating to the separation of church and state – in which she screamed, “It’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists,” among other things.

There are several extrapolations that can be drawn from such a bewildering statement. Most saliently, Davis has revealed that she believes free thought and expression to be dangerous and out of place in the various public spheres belonging to American civil society. She obviously thinks that some forms of speech – namely, those with which she fails to agree – should be curtailed, in order for such thoughts not to reach impressionable members of society.

There are, of course, other inferences to be drawn from Davis’ hate speech, but they all seem to reinforce a thematic congruency that can be reduced as follows: Monique Davis is not a good American.

In support this conclusion, consider the following: She is a bigot who wants to interfere with the religious practices that are predicated upon beliefs whose veracity she disputes. Further, since she obviously fails to possess the intellectual faculties necessary for her to produce arguments in opposition to a particular system of beliefs, she is reduced to cruelly shouting at those whose beliefs she denies, citing hysterically fabricated consequences that will ensue if her opponent’s abilities to publicize his or her arguments are not curtailed. Therefore, her only recourse is to fear monger in an attempt to illicit the censorship of her adversaries.

At the very least, Monique Davis must be censured by her legislative colleagues. The venomous hate that she spews must by rebuked, and she must face public humiliation. If there is anything dangerous to which children can be exposed, it is the bigotry and the hatred that Davis embodies. This does not indicate that we should curtail her ability to speak publicly. However, responsible members of the political body, in which she has procured a seat, need to clearly state that her speech – which is at odds with our most fundamental values as Americans – is not demonstrative of the guiding-principles that instruct the Illinois State Senate as it deliberates over public policy.

Russell Cole

Tags: atheism, freedom of religion, government, illinois, illinois legislature, journalism, monique davis, politics, religion, Russell Coles Blog
Categories: Commentary, Russell Cole's Blog, Politics, Religion, Atheism, journalism
No Comments »

I had never imagined that such a thing as Super-delegates could exist in the Democratic Party, until the media finally illuminated for the public this vile aspect of the Party structure; a component to the Democrat’s primary process that is exemplary all of the worse values and qualities that have defined the ethos possessed by the privileged factions in this country, who have endeavored – since this Nation’s inception – to monopolize its political institutions as much as possible while, nevertheless, maintaining a façade of democracy.

These anti-democratic patterns of political behavior – which spawn from ideological convictions that are so deeply entrenched that they qualify as genetic coding: the building blocks of American sociality – are embraced by a status that regards itself as uber-citizens: Those who possess self-alleged prowess and mental fitness enabling them not only to politically advocate their own interests, but to represent others in the process, despite the absence of any consent on the part of those for whom the elitist camp of surrogates will speak.

The core of elitist collaborators, who ultimately control, to a large measure, the American system of government, relish the opportunity to insert complexities into the political operations of this country. This amounts to a hierarchical inter-grouping of political decision-making bodies that distance – through the unnecessary multiplication of entities – the lowest common denominator of the American citizenry from the institutional spaces in which the final determinations, deciding the posture of American governance, are ultimately worked out.

Take for instance, the use of proportionate voting on the part of the Democratic Party. When analyzed in isolation from a detached perspective, this appears to be a relatively simple and straight forward reform that is designed to increase the influence of those who are not members of electoral majorities; providing an alternative to the more conventional American electoral practice in which the winner takes all. However, when purveyed within a scope that includes other provisions, such as the practice of valuating the votes of particular districts in some States higher than the votes cast in other districts in the same State: a device used to reward geographically defined populations that have demonstrated higher levels of electoral support for past Democratic Presidential Candidates – we are quick to fine that no concise and generally intellectually accessible description of the primary processes can possibly be constructed.

To cite another example of these excessively complicated processes, the State of Texas affords citizens the opportunity to vote twice in the Democratic Primary: once through a type of caucusing; the other instance by means of a primary ballot. I would endeavor to go on in further detail describing the primary selection practices, however, in order for me to do so, I would be pressed into conducting extensive investigations; a less than inspiring research project that would involve reading state party bylaws and state statutes as well as the National Democratic Party’s Bylaws, so that I could eventually interrelate all of the various stipulations, emanating from different bodies, when arriving at some sense of the applicable procedures that ultimately dictate how this ridiculous carnival is performed.

Because of this condition – what we can call political scholasticism – an inquiring layman, who is struggling to come to terms with the Primary selection process, will soon find himself lost in the convoluted mesh mash of procedures belonging to this social construct that is awash in a sea of obfuscation. In fact, I would venture to suggest that an accurate and precise conception of these complexities can only be rendered by the Party-hack-scholastics; some of whom were, in part, responsible for crafting this monstrosity. By extension, it surely is not spurious to suggest that there is a circuitous motivation inducing these insider-hacks into concocting what amounts to some kind of esoteric electoral alchemy: If one can monopolize the production of gold by virtue of a mastery of an arcane knowledge, then he would surely want his practices to remain opaque; or else, the precious metal could be produced by most anybody and it would fail to retain its special value.

It would be partially reassuring if the Democratic Primaries were an anomaly when understood comparatively within the full scope of institutions and practices comprising American politics and governance. Unfortunately, however, ranging back to the very inception of the United States, we can trace the same sort of Byzantine procedures, creating the same types of obscure and sometimes convoluted governing practices. To cite an obvious exemplar, consider the Electoral Delegates: super-voters entrusted with the capacity of choosing the President. Collectively, this body – which qualifies as an appendix in the sense that it is utterly extraneous to a democratic polity – counts as a democratically superfluous sub-aggregate, whose political Prerogative procedurally preempt the Popular Will of the Citizenry: The common denominator that could, otherwise, in a more authentic democratic environment, select the President independently and directly; whereby a majority or, even, a plurality of votes cast would act as the final adjudicator when selecting a candidate for the High Office.

The institution of the Electoral College, concocted by our Constitutional Founders, marks a latency in our sociopolitical history: a subtext that follows a pattern in which the uber-citizenry – those feigning the embrace of democracy while, concurrently, enacting political obstructions serving to compromise the Popular Will – has persistently committed to praxis a political philosophy that essentially boils down to a doctrinaire attachment to a Tory exceptionalness. Taking into consideration this pattern of elitist, anti-democratic conduct on the part of the privileged few in our Country’s history, one might ponder why there appears to be no resistance to this muffled, semi-tyrannical hegemony in our society.

First off, it should be mentioned that there have been popular insurrections against the American elites and the conditions they have endeavored to impose by virtue of the networked coordination of their economic and sociopolitical influences. The most salient instance of rebellion among American Plebes consisted of the formation of various Farmer Alliances and the People’s Party they would come to conjointly form.

However, despite the poignancy of the first Populist Movement during the final decades of the Nineteenth Century, this episode in American sociopolitical relations has been predictably left relatively untreated by our educational institutions. This lack of attention to an extraordinary event in American history is understandable, due to the fact that the Agrarian Revolt does not fit into the preemptive interpretive pattern organizing how we are supposed to conceptualize the course of American history. A thorough study and understanding of the People’s Party would expose contradictions to the Whiggish orthodoxy that enforces a dogmatic interpretation of American history in which democracy is in a state of perpetual improvement.

Therefore, the aforementioned question – why no rebellion to sociopolitical elitism? – is in need of reformulation: There have been a few, sparse uprisings to the old guard of American sociopolitical relations. However, why do we fail to treat these instances of American history hermeneutically? We neglect to come to an understanding of these instances according to their own terms and their own political self-understandings, along with the related complaints that they leveled against sociopolitical institutions that they regarded as oppressive; exploitative; unfair; or unfitting for a democracy to instantiate.

Rather, such incidents of insurrection find themselves excluded from the historical alacrity that is directed upon what are conventionally conceived as American sociopolitical accomplishments. In other words, historical events that are contrariwise to the established ideological order are treated as transient deviations; inconsequential digressions, diverting consciousness away from the core thesis embodied by the American Experience: An overall process that tells of advancement and ongoing maturation of American Society and of the American State, as they evolve into a more democratic condition. I would venture to assert that it is almost an Aristotelian metaphysics of political history: The American nation-state possesses an essence that is tantamount to its potentiality that it strives to actualize, which translates into a course of events where the essence of America protrudes and emerges; a process that parallels the advancement of perfecting democratic polity.

The Whiggish character of American historical orthodoxy, however, cannot be attributed with the function of the sole antecedent precipitating the compliant and obedient dispositions that have been all too pervasively exhibited by American Plebes. In order to understand the submissiveness among American Plebes, we need to direct our attention upon another factor; one whose presence is nearly ubiquitously represented by the portraits of our governing elites offered to us by mass media.  We are incited to a state of awe in relation to our institutions of political power by virtue of the fact that our media representations - due to the competition for ratings - are dramatizations of events; not objective reports of the events that have transpired that are of social significance.  From the epic framework in which corporate journalism is packaged, we are induced into believing that our politicos are heroes in the sense attribute to the term by the Ancient Greeks:  Apart from their mortality, they are godlike.  Consequently, we see the elites who govern us not only as competent, but as transcendent, as well.

This necessity is reinforced by the arcane procedures and practices that have come to litter – and, in fact, dilute – American systems of democratic participatory polity. By creating a situation whereby the elites are the limited few who actually possess an operational understanding of the processes through which political decisions are made – whether in the party primaries; or, to cite another example, the parliamentary conventions of Congress – they incite participatory reticence on the part of outsiders – who have neglected to pass through the socializing institutions through which the Power Elite transmits its esoteric knowledge and reproduces itself. Thus, we arrive in our analysis at the concept, wonkish: a self-congratulatory expression chattered in self-reference by the governing elite. This terminology’s meaning essentially boils down to the following definition: a state of public policy expertise.

The professionalization – (a concept that is most always predicated with the notion of expertise) – of politics resembles the historically recent trends in the rest of our society. Especially in the decades following the Information Revolution – which happened to transpire in a time span that overlapped with a movement in the American Academe toward the hyper-specialization of its professionalized disciplinarity – American governance has evolved into a condition that is sometimes referred to as technocracy. This political state can be characterized as one were the ability to formulate and administer public policy has become the province of technocrats in society; a form of plutocracy in which the common masses of citizenry no longer possess the knowledge and ability to fully participate in their political and governmental affairs. The task of governance has become highly compartmentalized, technical, and esoteric; whereas, seemingly, the only members of society who possess the necessary skills to govern are those trained in the specialized knowledge pursuits that are related to public policy concerns.

The propagation of this class of public-policy-technocrats – which includes the politicians who are trained in the lawmaking rituals from which earmarks and other benefits are procured for constituencies – is justified by the following chimera: In order to administer government, one must possess the technocratic specializations associated with being a Wonk; or else, he would buckle under the enormity of the intellectual, technical challenges he would face, and he will be rendered impotent, incapable of effecting the desired outcomes from participation in the processes of polity and public administration.

To quickly dispel such an polemic that insists upon the necessity of a technocracy in our society, we can refer to recent history: The FBI, following the 9/11 Tragedy and the scrutiny it incited – which was directed upon the agencies of the Federal Government that were previously thought to be protecting us from such calamities – it was found that the FBI possessed an antiquated information technology infrastructure; a partial explanation of the nearly unbelievable inability for the FBI “to Connect the dots.” In short, the FBI’s organization of information had yet to embrace mechanisms and processes associated with the informational economy and its digitalization of documents, that can, subsequently, be manipulated through computational machineries in order to find and establish relational values between and among the various types of information, which, subsequently, can be used in order to adduce inferences regarding additional parameters. Although this seems nearly inconceivable, the FBI’s manipulation of information was actualized, for the most part, in the deployment of pre-digital technologies, involving FBI employees sorting various document types, whose embodiment took the form of ink on paper, into filing cabinets.

It should be mentioned, there was some sort of computerization extant within the FBI. However, the dumb terminals provided to agents where practically left in their state of dumbness, because one could not use them to retrieve – through some effective search engine algorithm – materials relevant to the subject, or topic, that was being addressed by an FBI agent. As a result, the nodes belonging to the FBI’s informational networking – a system, which had, in some extensively qualified capacity, crossed the digital divide; or, at least, had attempted to accomplish as much – was never endowed with the intelligence – or smartness – that is associated with terminals that constitute the nodes belonging to an advanced informational network. It is only through the role assumed by a machine, acquiring a position within many linkages through which information is transferred in and throughout a network, that it becomes a useful tool for an agent looking to increase or intensify his knowledge and understanding of a topic by relating relevant information types to other information types.

As one can anticipate, the FBI, following the revelations related to the antiquated condition of its information management, set out to create an information architecture that was in line with contemporary technologies and procedures. However, the problem with the subsequent efforts made by the FBI, when working to modernize itself, can be characterized through the following: It was the FBI that was left in charge of the project. Consequently, after spending millions upon millions and expending valuable time and man-hours when attempting to install an information management system, the FBI finally had to report to Congress that the entire project had failed; could not be salvaged; and, therefore, had to be scrapped entirely.

Despite their follies, they persist in their arrogance, and continue to adopt a paternalistic posture in their relationship to the common citizenry. The present Administration –impervious to any scrutiny or oversight – continues to treat us like fools, constantly informing us of the attacks upon the domestic United States that it has thwarted; all the while refusing to disclose any convincing evidence to justify such fear mongering. Making it all the more ironic, the Bush Administration has failed to competently perform is duty to protect the American Public, not once, but on three occasions: the 9/11 Tragedy; the hyper-actively and impetuously devised invasion of Iraq; and the national shame and humiliation that was Hurricane Katrina. Nevertheless, despite their ostensible incompetency, these instances of failure are simply submitted through the ordinary propaganda assembly lines – where they are reassembled, packaged up, and refurnished – only to be publicized within the same garbled mess as all of the rest of the fear mongering and baiting with which we are unceasingly bombarded.

This audacity on the part of those who claim to know better than others know for themselves is justified by what amounts to a plutocratic apologia: The popular will of the unrefined and vulgar American people constitutes a threat to the vested interests of those who are endowed with the prudence and sound judgment necessary to advance not only their own interests, but, additionally, the long term interests of the nation as a whole.

This is the type of thinking that spawns absurdities such as “Trickle-down economics:” a theory of convenience, which Naomi Klein has revealed in some of her weblog writings to be a device deployed to obfuscate unbridled greed on the part of corporatists and, more generally, the ownership class in society; economic elitists who were in need of an intellectual diversion so that the swelling of class antagonisms, fomenting among those suffering under supply-side tax reforms, could be assuaged.

Although it might seem unfair to lump together, under the rubric of uber-citizens, elitist factions such as the Clintonian Political Machinery with the neoconservatives who currently control the Executive Branch of Government, we need to remember that the differences between neocons and neoliberals are all too scarce. There remains a thematic congruency between the two uber-factions; a convergence comparable to the opposing sides of a coin: The antithetical representations – where one side is emblazon with the head; the other side, the tale – that, despite their surface distinctions, continue to be of the same ilk; formed within the same mold; and made out of the same alloy.

In fact, both the Clintonian Third-way neoliberals – who feign empathy with the plight of American labor suffering from free-trade – and the neoconservatives – who do not even bother to express acknowledgement of such hardships – share in the same condescending rhetoric that is used to dismiss voices, emanating from the masses, that raise objection to American trade policies. The elitist corps have fashioned a rhetoric with pejoratives, such as neo-populism, that they use when disdainfully depicting the sociopolitical interpretations and reactions to socioeconomic conditions produced by the populace; which stand in contradiction to the uber-citizenry’s self-allegedly detached and rationally disposed estimates of current affairs and their overall significance within larger historical chains of events; narratives that are structured according to the Whiggish premise that American social conditions are always advancing toward a better state.

So, the final consideration that I shall make in this unwieldy chain of criticisms upon the conditions under which we, as Americans, suffer, can be put simply as follows: For how long are we to entertain this carnivalesque side-show hyper-real-democracy before we impose a realist aesthetic upon this charade and expose this chicanery for what it is?

Tags: clintons, corporations, corporatism, economics, government, neo conservatism, neoconservatism, politics, power, Russell Coles Blog, self governance
Categories: Commentary, Economics, government, Russell Cole's Blog, self-governance, Power, Politics, Corporations, neoconservatism
No Comments »

An Article by:

Russell Cole

The purpose of this essay is to bring scrutiny to an alarming trend in American governance. This growing practice is propounded by differing groups in our society, ranging from the neoconservatives to the quasi-academicians occupying fellowships at the politically moderate Brookings Institute.

In a publication produced by members of the Brookings’ Institute, the emerging practice has been labeled with the following expression, “Governing by Network.” This philosophy of governance looks to institutions and organizations outside of government in order to outsource the work of government; thus, privatizing many of the functions that would, otherwise, be implemented by governmental agencies and the civil professionals who work under their auspices.

The purpose of this brief essay is to refocus this governing philosophy through the lens of an entirely different interpretative framework, in order to bring to the fore some of the alarming outcomes that might result from this practice of outsourcing government. I will make the case that governing by network is tantamount to corporatism, and, therefore, poses a threat to the already compromised democracy that we, as Americans, have historically struggled to enact and, presently, continue to enjoy; although in recent years our democratic system of polity has suffered a flurry of incursions made by the current Imperial Presidency.

At first glance, this might appear to be a sound policy. Looking toward corporations in the economy and NGOs in civil society might provide a means by which to rely upon organizations in society that are already specialized in particular types of operations, making them more efficient and effective agents for carrying out the missions underlying government initiatives. In the language of neoconservatism, privatizing the military, for instance, will make America’s war machinery subservient to the pressures of the market; subsequently, ensuring that America’s mechanisms for carrying out its foreign policies that rely upon militarism are the most fit for that purpose.

This whole arcade of mercenary contractors waging war in Iraq is by no means an ad hoc appendage to the military proper, whose idea and implementation were incited solely from the contingencies of the Iraqi campaign. Rather, the privatization of the military had been, from inception of the Bush Presidency, a guiding-principle for Rumsfield and his efforts to reform the American military complex. From the beginning of his tenure as the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfield had been working with his favored contacts in the private sector in order to facilitate the outsourcing of many of the functions of the military and the Pentagon; thus, increasing the role of private contractors in America’s military affairs. This protracted endeavor to outsource as many military operations as possible was part of a metaphorical war being waged against the military bureaucracy; a complex – according to Rumsfield, and in accord with neoconservative thought patterns – of obsolescent bureaucratic institutions, which burdened the American state with inefficiency, resulting in governmental waste.

There are, of course, manifold examples to cite when it comes to illuminating the concrete manifestations of the emergent doctrine, governing by network. To cite a more seemingly benign example, Bush’s policy of funding faith-based organizations for the purposes of providing social welfare services to the dependent and needy constitutes an instance of governing by network, because it involves integrating organizations that exist in civil society into the operations and functions of government; relieving the state from the encumbrance of constructing the institutional architecture required for it to perform these tasks on its own.

Although, prima facie, these uses of the private sector to facilitate the execution of public policies might appear innocuous and, even, pragmatic. Nevertheless, there is a more sinister dimension to these practices, which reflects a motivation possessed by the adherents of this public policy philosophy that needs to be rendered transparent, so that the full scope of consequences brought about by governing by network is apparent to the American citizen.

In the initial paragraph of this essay, I pointed out that the privatization of governance can alternatively be referenced under the term, corporatism. By this, I am indicating that the privatization of government will have the entailment of creating a political system in which the distinctions between polity and the economy are effectively blurred; resulting of the integration of the economy, along with the elites who control it, with the institutions and decision-making mechanisms of government. I say this because private entities in the economy can just as well affect the policy making processes belonging to the politic sphere of society - and will have a much greater incentive to do so if government is outsourced – through interventions such as their corporate lobbying and the campaign donations extended to politicos by corporate elites – as can the body politic impact upon the firms in the economy through the adoption of government policy.

Therefore, by privatizing governmental services, we run the risk of having corporations influencing what policies will be implemented by affecting political decision-making outcomes in an attempt to ensure revenue through governmental contracts. This networking of polity with the economy and civil society will precipitate working relationships among the agencies in all three of the affected social spheres:  polity, civil society, and economics.  Resultantly, the policies taken up by government might reflect the economic interests that stand to benefit from particular policies; rather than having government policy address the needs and desires of the populace; members of society who do not necessarily possess the wealth and influence to countervail the corporate interests that stand to profiteer through particular types of policy implementations. In short, the government and the economy will merge into a union whereby policy and the motivations that underly it will be identical with interests emanating from the economic sector and from the advocacies associated with NGOs in civil society; a collection of non-governmental agencies that stand to benefit by virtue of the contracts that will ensue from the networked administration of public policies.

There is an even more alarming aspect to the consequences engendered by governing by network: The constitutional protections that restrict governmental interference in the private and civic affairs of citizens can effectively be circumvented by implementing the policies of government through the employment of private institutions that are not beholden to the same limitations imposed upon government by the Constitution. This is what makes the discussion among neoconservatives so disconcerting, in which they are presently entertaining the prospect of outsourcing domestic intelligence gathering to private firms who will then be entrusted with spying upon American citizens.

This plan that is being advanced by the in-member ideologues of the current Administration in conjunction with their sympathizers and consultants occupying positions in various neoconservative think-tanks, if allowed to materialize, will result in more than the “soft fascism,” described by Ron Paul in his warnings about corporatism; it presents the possibility of effectively imposing a rather profound and extensive form of authoritarianism upon the American public. We will be subjected to the unfettered intrusions and spying eyes of private entities outside the constraining parameters that have been, heretofore, erected by Constitutional Rights. We will have to fear with whom we associate and with whom we transact communications – let alone indulgences in vice; or contributions to radicalized political advocacies – because we will have no expectation that we can maintain any seclusion of these activities in the sense that we will not be able to conceal information and curtail knowledge about our engagements, as private citizens, from institutions who might react punitively if presented with such renderings of our social activities. When in the hands of private firms conducting domestic intelligence gathering, what is to stop our employers from purchasing such information in order to assess our interactions outside of the workplace, so the firm can successfully impose a lifestyle – through the threat of occupational termination upon those who deviate – that they deem appropriate for those assuming positions in the ranks of their employment.

Consider, even, the current push to centralize and digitize our health records. Of course, they attempt to assuage our concerns by emphasizing the improvements to the administration of health care that will be actualized through the availability to health care professionals of an archive containing our complete medical histories that can be instantaneously retrieved via information technologies. However, what other possibilities will be enacted through the creation of such a repository of personalized information regarding matters of our biographies that we consider to be, oftentimes, sensitive and highly private? Might we be obliged by potential employers to permit their human resource agents to investigate for what we have received treatment by physicians and when that treatment was administered?  For some us, we risk even having to disclose out relationships with psychiatrists and other practitioners of mental health care. Additionally, through the nexus between the economy and polity that will be formed under the conditions depicted in the not so distant futurism that I am detailing, what recourse could we possibly have to prevent government agencies from obtaining the health records that will already be in the hands of corporations with whom government will have working relations? The rights to privacy that were referenced by the attorneys entrusted with the criminal defense of Rush Limbaugh will not be violated, they will simply be circumvented, bypassed, through the creation of cooperative enterprises involving both law enforcement and private entities in the economy or, perhaps, civil society, which might have access to personal medical records.

It is important to stress that the argument that I am making is not a polemic advancing a position in support of expanded government. However, I am quite explicitly warning against solutions to “Big Government,” that advance an agenda of privatizing government operations by outsourcing their functions to corporations and NGOs. The best remedy for inflated bureaucracy is the diminution of government and the services that it provides. The very worse trajectory in our social development would be pursuing the path followed by the ideologues in the Bush Administration, who are quite actively working to expand the powers of the Presidency; an expansion of authority that is leveled at the peril of civil liberties.

Tags: bill of rights, constitution, corporations, corporatism, democracy, economics, fascism, governing, government, homeland security, liberty, neoconservatism, politics, power, privatization, Russell Coles Blog, self governance
Categories: Commentary, Economics, Democracy, liberty, constitution, bill of rights, government, Russell Cole's Blog, self-governance, Power, Politics, Corporations, Homeland Security, neoconservatism
No Comments »

An Article by

Russell Cole

I have studied the development of this political and social ideology [neoconservatism] to some extent, and its primary forebear is a political philosopher by the name, Leo Strauss. He was most affected by Plato, and, in particular, The Republic. I presume this is where Strauss gained his authoritarian worldview, which is seeded in the monolithic polis speculated by Plato, where the society is structured according to a corporatist regime, negating any differentiation between polity and civil society.

Authoritarians, such as Strauss, tend to be moral realists, similarly to Plato, which provides them with their rhetorical devices needed to justify their ethnocentrism, making it appear not as an ideology spouted by a faction that strives to impose it upon others, but as the natural moral order to which all humanity should aspire and, indeed, be pushed.

However, this belief in absolutes – a single moral order that exists apart from the men and women who speculate over its contents – has the impact of diminishing reality in favor of an impression of the world that is propagated through the contrivance of ad hoc explanations for all events that seem to run contrary to the idealized vision of human sociality articulated in the moral realist’s camouflaged ethnocentrism.

This is the point at which I am mystified the most by the neo-cons: Moral realism results in a negation of the saliency that should otherwise be attributed to contingencies that unfold in empirical reality, in favor of an adoption of a faith-based form of reasoning, where one’s beliefs will always be vindicated in the long-run. In the context of this type of thinking, we can meaningfully interpret the expression “moral courage:” a quality that is lacking in anybody who espouses uncertainty as to the veracity of the neo-conservative system of beliefs. Moral realism, in this instance, ironically, appears to be more of an underlying posit supported by convictions of faith rather than any reflection of reality.

What all of this has to do with Bush, specifically, I do not know, because he is not necessarily intelligent enough to grasp the neocons’ system of thought, such as the case with the intellect of hubris personified, Paul Wolfiwitz. However, I am sure that Bush’s absolute convictions regarding his born again stature in the eyes of his god might translate into the same type of empirically uninformed decision-making processes. Only, in Bush’s case, he has mistaken Chaney whispering in his ear for the Word of the Lord Almighty.

So, then, the question now arises: Why, even as the neo-conservatives – through their follies in Iraq and other ‘terror,’ related policy matters – have completely undressed themselves - Americans continue, as a population, to fail to mobilize in opposition to the Bush Regime?

As far as getting people off of their couches and politically engaged, I believe the problem is the deference we as Americans are socialized to possess and exhibit, beginning at a young age, whereby we are instructed to demonstrate respect and obedience toward our extant sociopolitical institutions. It does not matter what people might suspect or come to believe according to the conclusions reached in their own internal contemplations as long as they are encumbered with a habitual deferential posture that is assumed in relationship to sociopolitical institutions; fixtures that we are socialized to take to be transcendent of human interference and contamination. Even Tocqueville remarked that Americans displayed obedience to sociopolitical institutions, which prevented, according to the French observer, radicalized political behavior. He speculated that American democracy might be made possible by this willing subservience. Therefore, it is a matter of reinvigorating Americans with a sense of existential angst that is the key to unlocking radicalized currents of both thoughts and their associative social undertakings.

Returning to concerns related to religion: I would assume that Bush, indeed, during moments of cynicism, does use religiosity as a political artifice. Remember, the remarks made by Bush in the lead up to the War in Iraq, where he made mention of a “Great Crusade,” that we, as a nation, were about to undertake. Obviously, in retrospect, we can recognize this as a ploy to garner support from the war-mongering-religious-right that finds a place in our unfortunate society.

These remarks are not intended to be a denouncement of all instances of religiosity. I do make a differentiation between the dogma of fundamentalism and the personal spiritualism – associated with countercultural religious movements – which I suspect Jesus – the historical figure – to have proffered the latter in his sermons, because it is only with absolutism and dogma that religiosity manifests its deleterious qualities; what we witness in the Christianity that was tragically left to us by the sexually impotent, female loathing, and physically diminutive Paul, who knew nothing of Jesus other than Christ’s appearances in Paul’s own hysteria and its precipitation of fanciful delusions.

Russell Cole

Tags: corporations, democracy, foreign policy, government, imperialism, National, neoconservatism, politics, Russell Coles Blog, social responsibility, society, sociology
Categories: Commentary, National, Society, Democracy, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Politics, Corporations, Sociology, Foreign Policy, Imperialism, social responsibility, neoconservatism
No Comments »

The need for direct democracy in America has never been more apparent than it is right now. We - the populace - are left impotent as the politicians whom we elected to office as representatives neglect to embody in their advocacies the will and interests that we - the American Public - possess, whose demands for a withdrawal from Iraq; whose oppositions to the advancing diminution of civil liberties; whose sentiments concerning illegal immigration; are all falling upon the unreceptive ears of the Congress and the White House.

It has become clear following the Democratic procurement of power in the two Congressional bodies that the people of America do not have a voice in the affairs of their government. Despite the lofty declarations of intent enunciated by the Democratic leadership during the campaigns leading to the expulsion of Republicans from Congress, the Democrats have delivered nothing.

For example, the marginal increase in the minimum wage successfully installed by the Democrats is absolutely meaningless, since most States have already passed legislation rasing their own minimum wages to levels that exceed the hike enacted by the Democrats in the House and in the Senate. Furthermore, the additional sum specified in the legislation fails to amount to anything approximating a living wage. Therefore, what is the point? since those unfortunate enough to be working for minimum wage will continue to need assistance from government services, and - despite the hours and frenetic intensities at which they toil at their occupations - they will fail to accumulate the resources necessary to reinvest in themselves - through education or entrepreneurial ventures - so that they might ascend to a higher stratum within the American socio-economic stratifications.

Another instance of Democratic ineptitude involved the abundance of time that was wasted in the legislator-deal-making charade of representative democracy, which only resulted in a stunning failure to pass immigration reform. This demonstration of astoundingly acute incompetences on the parts of the Democratic and Republican leadership in the Senate will always have a place in the recesses of my memory due to the gaspingly condescending and equally idiotic speech given by Harry Reid, where he quoted Dr. Sues at length in an ill conceived rhetorical ploy to make his enormously convoluted, internally contradicting, and substantively hollow piece of legislation appear to be a pending bill that even a child could recognize as meritorious legislation in need of passing by Congress.

Reid’s lengthy quotation from a children’s book even outdid his previous remarks in support of legalizing illegal immigration, where he alluded to the need of casinos in his own State of Nevada not to lose their workforce of Latino maids. Although I certainly have sympathy for the Latino migrants who are exploited by the Las Vegas gambling industry, I cannot imagine a sector in the United States economy for which I could possibly possess less concern.

It is a wonder how this self-righteous idiot - the Senate Majority Leader - not only obtained his seat in the Senate, but came to control the Democratic caucus in this esteemed deliberative body.

To push on beyond Reid, we can cite the Democratic concessions to the White House with respect to the funding of the Iraq War. In defiance of the campaign promises that propelled the Democrats into power in the Congress, the Democrats in the House and Senate have given the Bush Administration exactly what it has insisted upon in form of the supplemental funding bills needed to persist in the financing of this black hole that has formed in what was previously the sovereign state of Iraq.

And finally, to top things off, the Democrats have passed a bill that was advertised as the modernization of FISA, which, in actuality, had nothing to do with revamping FISA in order for it to adequately address new technologies; rather, the legislation merely dismantled and discarded with significant aspects of the oversight that was previously performed by FISA. In short, going over and beyond even what was requested by the Imperial Presidency, the Democrats gave powers to the Executive Branch to monitor the activities of citizens without any oversight or check by the Judicial Branch of Government.

It has become clear that the Democratic Party presents no alternative venue of political representation for those of us who had, heretofore, perceived the Republican Party as the real threat to American civil liberties and economic prosperity. I think, at this point, we should feel compelled to accept what has become ostensible: America is not a democracy in any sense of the word. Remember, the Soviet Empire had elections, as well. However, similarly to the condition of American politics, the mere casting of a vote in an election had little or no consequence because, ultimately, government and its administration of public policies would be entirely the same no matter who came to be elected in the various branches of polity.

Russell Cole

Tags: bush, congress, democracy, Democrats, direct democracy, economics, government, labor, political parties, politics, Russell Coles Blog
Categories: Commentary, Economics, Democracy, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Politics, Congress, Labor, Direct Democracy
No Comments »